In a hole and still digging: the left and Brexit

Wayne Asher

“The fighting party of the advanced class need not fear mistakes. What it should fear is persistence in a mistake, refusal to admit and correct a mistake out of a false sense of shame”.1 Thus Lenin, writing on the eve of the Russian Revolution. But his warning echoes down through the decades for the benefit of all revolutionaries. It is the contention of this article that the traditional left in Britain has committed a colossal mistake in its approach to Brexit, and is making matters worse by an obstinate refusal to correct it.

The left’s opposition to the European Union goes back to the early 1970s and became an important topic in 1975 when the Harold Wilson government tried to solve its internal divisions over the Common Market, as it then was, by calling for a referendum. Almost the entire left, including the International Socialists (IS)—forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), called for a No vote, a vote that is, to leave the Common Market. This was on the basis that the Common Market was a bosses’ club, and that the UK ruling class was eager to remain because there was strength in numbers at a time of historically high class conflict. Further, the Common Market was a reactionary organisation, a consciously undemocratic construct that could never lead to a united socialist states of Europe.

The main position paper explaining all this appeared in International Socialism. It described the EEC (European Economic Community), as “a customs union plus a dear-food agricultural protection scheme plus a supra-national bureaucracy with considerable formal regulatory powers but no guns”.2 Note the point about “no guns” well. The EU is not a state—yet it is seriously suggested among the left and by Jeremy Corbyn too—that the Brussels bureaucracy would be an ­unresolvable obstacle to a Corbyn government with a large popular mandate. The Morning Star, once the Communist Party’s daily and still publishing today, said: “A Labour government determined to take our railways and postal services back into public hands would soon run into trouble with the EU”.3 Corbyn himself has also been guilty of this timid formalism: “We need to look very carefully at the terms of any trade relationship, because at the moment we are part of the single market, obviously. That has within it restrictions on state aid and state spending”.4 In practice, of course, Brussels cannot even prevent much smaller capitals such as Hungary and Poland from defying basic EU tenets of bourgeois democracy.

Still, it is important for what follows to note that the 1975 analysis was an accurate picture at the time and remains true today. Why then, can we argue that to take an identical position, based on the same arguments, in the 2016 referendum was a mistake? Simple. Objective circumstances and the balance of class forces had changed.

In 1975, IS probably had 4,500 members, many of them were respected militants; some of the factory branches formed in the heat of 1974 still existed. The possibility of building a national rank and file movement was still pursued very seriously. The International Marxist Group had over 1,000 members as did Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party. The Communist Party, had, on paper, over 30,000 members and was massively influential in the workers’ movement. The Labour government, brought to power in 1974 by the rising class struggle, featured well-known left wingers such as Peter Shore, Tony Benn and Michael Foot in senior cabinet positions.

In February that year, International Socialism said: “We must utilise every opportunity to play a leading part in any referendum campaign (including probably organisational participation) and to draw closer to the left social-democratic workers, most of whom will not be active [Labour Party] people) and to fight for our perspective and programme amongst them”.5 The confidence and optimism and ambition positively shouts off the page here, something related directly to the times.

In other words, the pool in which we swam in 1975 was much bigger, the chance to build an authentic left-wing opposition movement much greater and, it must be remembered, this was pretty much a clear left/right split. For, apart from outliers like Enoch Powell and Richard Body, virtually all the Tory Party favoured staying in the EEC. The fascist National Front campaigned for an Out vote, but most of the left thought they were sufficiently strong to avoid an Out campaign falling victim to reactionary nationalism.

In the event, In won by 67.2 percent to 32.8 percent. In a relatively favourable environment, a left alternative still could not carry the day, although it is quite true that the highest Out vote in England came in South Yorkshire, then one of the epicentres of workers’ militancy.

Flash forward to 2016. No-one I suppose, doubts that the left was ­immeasurably weaker than in 1975, both in numbers, size of periphery and in class implantation. There is no controversy about why this dispiriting fact should be so; the long downturn, now of historical length, massive de-industrialisation and the failure to unionise the vast number of new workers derived from technological change (in the IT and telecoms industries for example). In this unpromising environment, how likely was it that there would be a viable space for a Lexit given the disappointment of 1975? How likely was it that opposition to the EU, a left-wing argument in 1975, would not end up as an extreme right-wing one in 2016 with all that implied for the UK political scene?

After a false start, pro-Corbyn group Momentum did eventually understand this fundamental point. After originally not taking a position, just one month before the vote, the leadership polled the members, who voted by two to one to support a Remain position. Momentum criticised the EU on exactly the same grounds that the SWP did; it called for a pan-European anti-austerity movement, radical democratisation of the EU and an end to fortress Europe. But on the concrete issue of the day it concluded that Brexit would be “a victory for the nationalist right and their campaign against migrants”.6 Michael Chessum, then a member of Momentum’s steering committee, said: “There is now a growing coalition of coming together to campaign for a Remain vote on an unapologetically progressive and critical basis—for freedom of movement, internationalism and solidarity across borders”.7 It was possible in 2016 to have a position that was critical of the EU but founded in the concrete reality of the situation.

It is worth speculating as to why Momentum got this decision right—which I argue is very unusual among the UK left. One factor must be that Momentum is a very large organisation with over 40,000 members and many more supporters. That means its periphery is also correspondingly larger and its members talk to more people. Another is that its members are relatively young. A third factor is that, as a new organisation, its membership looked at the issue with fresh eyes, not from the perspective of 1975.

The SWP position, from Alex Callinicos, appeared in this journal. His article reiterated many of the well-accepted and understood shortcomings of the EU, especially after the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and the move to a single currency. Unfortunately, he seems to have believed that the real need of his position paper was to explain the reactionary nature of the EU on the grounds that: “The underlying assumption of those on the left supporting a Yes vote is that the EU represents, however imperfectly, the transcendence of nationalism and so internationalists and anti-racists should vote for Britain to remain in the EU”.8

But this is emphatically not so—it is quite possible, as Momentum did—to accept the traditional left analysis of the EU and still argue that the correct decision in the 2016 referendum was to argue for Remain. Whatever the levels of oppression and unpleasantness in today’s Britain, they are not the fault of Brussels but of two decades of New Labour and the Tories, and neither were reliant on Brussels to carry through such policies. Socialists who argued for a Remain vote did so not because of illusions in the EU but because they saw that the main issue in the campaign—given the weakness of the left—would inevitably be reactionary nationalism and outright racism.

After the surprise Leave vote in the 2016 referendum, almost all the left then persuaded itself that there had indeed been some kind of popular uprising against austerity. From the Labour left, Diane Abbott MP, a close associate of Corbyn, called the vote “a roar of defiance against the Westminster elite”.9 Charlie Kimber, again writing in this journal, said: “The central issue is that it was a revolt against the establishment. People who are generally forgotten, ignored or sneered at delivered a stunning blow against the people at the top of society; this was a rejection of the governing class”.10Writing in Socialism Today, published by the Socialist Party, successor to Militant, Peter Taaffe wrote: “There was a determination to give the ‘toffs’ a bloody nose—those who do not have to live in the deprivation that the Tories and capitalism have created. Traditional Labour areas and regions voted heavily against the government led by the two ‘big butchers’, Cameron and Osborne, with only Northern Ireland, Scotland and London voting for remain”.11 And, for The Socialist, the Socialist Party’s newspaper; “the size of the working class vote for Leave represented—in essence—a revolt, a cry of rage, against the low pay, cuts in public services and insecure housing”.12

Is this true though? Or is there an element of wishful thinking involved here?

The best analysis of why people voted the way they did came from Lord Ashcroft’s exit poll, which talked to over 12,000 people straight after they had cast their vote. It is the gold standard of polling accepted by most Brexit commentators including Kimber quoted above.13

Ashcroft came up with some disturbing facts for those who would like to read into the result a vote against austerity, which by extension, should eventually benefit the left.

●Two out of three Labour voters voted Remain. (I suppose that voting Labour rather than Tory counts as the minimum entry level of class consciousness.)

●A majority of those in work voted Remain, irrespective of whether they were in part-time or full-time work.

●Two-thirds (67 percent) of those describing themselves as Asian voted Remain. Four out of five black voters (73 percent) voted Remain, and 70 percent of Muslim voters did so too. These voters obviously understand the real dog-whistle message during the referendum campaign.

●The generally accepted idea that working class areas voted massively for Leave is only partially correct; many did, but traditional working class areas in London delivered the highest Remain votes (peaking at 75 percent in Haringey and 78 percent in Hackney and Lambeth). Remain won in most of the great working class regional capitals (Bristol, Cardiff, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.) Only three cities of similar importance voted Leave and even then they did so by tiny margins (Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham). Working class Scotland voted massively for Remain of course.

The central issue to grasp in all this is that the working class was emphatically not monolithic; different sections voted very differently, and we need to understand why, and make sure we are aligned with the right part.

Ashcroft found something else interesting. Those who said they paid a great deal of attention to politics were evenly divided between Leave and Remain. But those who said they paid little or no attention to politics voted Leave by 58 percent to 42 percent. It is tempting on this basis to suspect that the 2.8 million who did not bother to vote in the 2015 general election but did so in the referendum—by definition low-information/low-engagement voters—voted massively to leave. It is striking that of the 20 areas with the highest increase in turnout, all were Leave areas.14 This 2.8 million rise in turnout is more than the wafer-thin Leave majority.

There is something else too. If the Leave vote was a populist uprising against Tory austerity, where did it suddenly come from? After all, in the election the previous year the Tories actually achieved an overall majority. They did this despite standing on their five-year record of austerity and promising more of the same—the Tory manifesto proposed cutting public spending and welfare by enough to end the budget deficit by 2018/19 and even run a budget surplus by 2020. Although their outright majority partly reflected the decimation of the Liberal Democrats’ vote, and was surely helped by the uninspiring nature of the Labour campaign around Ed Miliband, it remains true that there was no generalised anti-austerity outburst. In fact, there were even a dozen working class areas where, in 2015, the Tory vote roseand the Labour vote actually fell.15 Each was to deliver an emphatic Leave vote a year later.

So what was the vote really about? Alex Callinicos’s 2015 article warned “the referendum is about the EU as a whole, not just immigration. Socialists in Britain will have to take a stand on the entire project of European integration”.16

But Ashcroft’s pollsters asked people why they voted the way they did in the referendum. And it turns out that, for a very large slice of voters, immigration was exactly what it was about. Nearly half (49 percent) of Leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the EU was the argument about sovereignty—“the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK”. One third (33 percent) said the main reason was that leaving “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders”.

Immigration looks like a proxy for racism for many of these voters. Just 14 percent of Leavers thought immigration was a force for good, a massive 62 percent said it was a force for ill. Remainers, however, saw immigration as a force for good by 57 percent, and a force for ill by only 17 percent, with 26 percent seeing it as a mixed blessing.

The sovereignty argument doesn’t tell us enough of course about what laws people would like to make but felt that the EU prevented. Possibly, for some, it seemed a more polite way of talking about immigration. In the United States, the segregationist politicians of the 1960s Deep South couched their racism in terms of sovereignty—or states’ rights; “the federal government has no right to interfere in the laws and affairs of the sovereign state of Alabama” or some such. It was so much racist rubbish; everyone knew exactly what laws the state of Alabama wanted.

Austerity, NHS cutbacks, zero hours contracts, privatisation, the housing crisis, just did not come into what Leavers told the exit pollsters.

Still, it is a fact that a large section of the working class, the C2DEs in marketing speak, voted to Leave in something approaching a two to one ratio and that requires addressing. One way to do so is to note that the Brexit revolt—if such it was—was, from the point of view of socialists, an odd one, in that:

●It was disproportionately old: Ashcroft tracked how the younger you are, the more likely you were to vote Remain. But a majority of those aged over 45 voted to leave, rising to 60 percent of those aged 65 or over. A recent report from Warwick University, arguing that austerity did indeed cause Brexit,17 is likely to be wrong because of this factor. Austerity, together with its evil twin, Quantitative Easing, disproportionately hit the young (through rising rents, exclusion from owner-occupation, insecure jobs and student debt) while pensioner incomes did much better, partly due to the triple lock.18 Yet young people were by and large pro-Remain and pro-Corbyn—it was the retired who were the bedrock of Brexit support. (Neither did austerity differentiate between Remain and Leave areas—many Remain voting big cities were huge losers from austerity, a point this report missed).

●It was disproportionally white.

●It was disproportionately based in declining small/medium sized towns and rural areas. Some of these declining areas are ones where the Labour vote has, in fact, been gradually slipping for years.19

If this counts as a popular uprising, or the material for one, it must be ­comprised of a demographic unusual in working class history.

But of course, unusual is not the same as impossible. Kimber quotes Lenin to the effect that “to imagine that social revolution is conceivable…without ­revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression…to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution”.20Quite true. And fortunately to apply this to the Leave voters of 2016 is to some extent a testable proposition. Was this an incoherent but nevertheless progressive tide of the kind Lenin discussed? Or something else?

If it were, then we might expect to see the boost to workers’ confidence reflected in some industrial upturn. And indeed, strike figures for 2016 were twice as high as in 2015. Unfortunately, of the 145,000 increase on days lost over 2015, 129,000 of them were due to a single dispute, that of the junior doctors.21 And the next year, strikes fell to the lowest figure since records began in 1893 with just 77 strikes involving 33,000 workers.22

Or, if not in strikes, perhaps more workers found the confidence to join a union, an important but much “safer” and lower-level statement about your position in class society. In fact there were 275,000 fewer trade unionists in 2016, a 4.2 percent fall on 2015’s figure and the largest annual fall recorded since the official statistics were first presented this way in 1995.23

Did it lead to new bases of support for organisations such as the SWP? Well, a useful map24 on the party website showing party activities showed nothing in such Leave strongholds as Mansfield, Sunderland, Blackpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool.

Given the disproportionately aged Leave base, perhaps it is unlikely to expect that it would lead to an upsurge in union membership. But still, perhaps this “revolt against the establishment” (Kimber’s term) did lead to a generalised political upturn. Not at all—it turned out to generate greater support for the Conservative Party at the 2017 election in Brexit voting areas. The Tories actually improved their position in many traditional Labour areas, for example the Potteries, the former East Midlands coalfield, and the north east. Remember my assumption that voting Labour is a basic entry point to class consciousness; whatever the manifold failings of Labour, a vote for the Tories is an outright vote for the ruling class and for the status quo. Yet the abysmal level of class consciousness today is such that the Tories actually won five seats from Labour—in Walsall, Stoke-on-Trent, Middlesbrough, Mansfield and North East Derbyshire. Brexit was to blame for this. Lord Ashcroft’s General Election poll25 found that Tory voters regarded Brexit as (at 48 percent) the biggest issue in the election. Labour voters, however, were more concerned by the NHS (32 percent), the cuts (11 percent) and only then by Brexit (8 percent).

Labour, conversely, won many seats in the south, some for the first time ever. Labour performed much stronger in Remain areas, especially in London, and despite Corbyn’s carefully cultivated ambiguity on the issue. There really was a major political upturn in 2017; but we felt it in Canterbury and Kensington, in Warwick and Battersea—not in Stoke or Sunderland. Younger voters, not Brexit-supporting older ones, formed the core of the Corbyn upturn.

In any case, there is another big problem too. The proponents of a radical interpretation of the Brexit vote still have to come up against the Marxist truism that it is not possible to infer the class nature of a political movement simply from the class composition of its members. The largest section of the 1970s National Front consisted of waged (usually manual) workers, and it won its greatest electoral successes in working class areas. But there was, of course, nothing remotely progressive about it.26

Lenin warned against this fallacy when talking about the British Labour Party: “Whether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics”.27

Just look in this context at who led Brexit: Nigel Farage the former commodities trader, Jacob Rees-Mogg the fund manager, Boris Johnson the journalist and political dilettante, Arron Banks the insurance magnate. What, pace Lenin, is the real content of the hard Brexiteers—the Nigel Lawson who talked of Brexit completing the Thatcher revolution?28 The authors of Britannia Unchained, including Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Priti Patel, who claimed: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music”29?

Summing up, I believe there is quite enough evidence to show that much of Kimber’s “revolt against the establishment” actually came from a vastly expanded section of the reactionary, Conservative-voting working class, massively energised by the racist Leave campaign, and inspiring those who usually do not bother to vote. Both sections were motivated by a nostalgic and ­reactionary nationalism with no progressive characteristic whatsoever.

These working class conservatives, pro-Monarchy, pro law and order, anti-immigrant, often anti-union, have always been with us. Consider the February 1974 election, called at the very height of the class struggle during a miners’ strike, the Tories still—astonishingly—picked up 17 percent of the vote in Hemsworth, 18 per cent in Barnsley, 23 percent in Pontefract and Castleford and 26 percent in Rother Valley—all constituencies in the heart of the Yorkshire coalfield.

Two vignettes—snapshots admittedly—illustrate more about these voters in the context of Brexit. The British Election Study, based on 23,000 voters, found that the probability of voting Brexit rose from around 20 percent for those most opposed to the death penalty to 70 percent for those most in favour. A recent poll found that 60 percent of Brexiteers thought leaving the EU was more important than peace in Northern Ireland—with all that implied.30

If my analysis is correct, then the left (excluding Momentum) made the wrong decision. It had a formally correct analysis on the nature of the EU but fell into abstraction because it did not take into account the extreme weakness of left-wing forces and the inevitable nature of the Leave campaign in a downturn that has lasted decades.

Now, to some extent we can ask—so what? Why rake over these old and very divisive coals? Especially as the depleted revolutionary left of 2016 could never have changed the result of the vote; even Momentum could not do that. It is tempting to argue that what’s done is done and we need to move forward to the struggles ahead. “The line of division must not be whether you voted Leave or Remain but whether you now back Corbyn against the right,” in the words of Socialist Worker.31

On the one hand this is true. But consider this; the stakes are getting higher all the time and various dystopias—medicine and food shortages, the collapse of much of the car industry, a sharp increase in inflation—are now being discussed in everyday terms in the bourgeois press in a way that has not happened since the talk of military coups in 1974. If any of them come to pass after a (quite possibly accidental) no-deal crash-out, the political temperature will rise very rapidly indeed. For significant numbers of people it will be obvious that Brexit is to blame.

There will be opportunities for those who foresaw this and warned against it, and prepared its cadre for the arguments and struggles just over the horizon. A classic example from bourgeois politics; look at how Winston Churchill, an arch reactionary, was accepted as a wartime leader because people remembered that he had warned—at the price of great, but temporary, unpopularity—against Nazi rearmament and appeasement.

The gate will also be open, of course, for very sinister forces, already building up Britain’s own Dolchstoss, the stab-in-the-back legend which so helped the Nazis rise to power. Millions of Brexit voters are going to be very disappointed by the difference between what they thought they would get and what they in fact got, and will be looking for someone to blame.

As it is, the extra-parliamentary left is in great danger of being compromised by its support for Brexit as the political climate shifts. And there is evidence that it isshifting. Some snapshots to consider:

●A Sky data poll found 50 percent backing for a second referendum, with only 40 percent opposed.32

●A regular YouGov poll found majority support for a referendum on the exit terms.33

●Another regular YouGov tracker found that 72 percent of Labour voters said the referendum result was wrong.34

●Pressure for a second referendum is growing in the Labour Party, and growing in Momentum too, which, despite the fact that it supported Remain, successfully manoeuvred to prevent such a debate at last year’s Labour Party conference in order to avoid embarrassing Corbyn.35

As Brexit approaches, it is to be expected that these figures will continue to rise. Yet for Socialist Worker, nothing has changed and there seems to be no sense of self-reflection; no regular comparison of the party line with the reality on the ground. It continues to oppose a second referendum, or a vote on the terms of exit, saying that the issue with the growing calls for a People’s Vote was that “the problem is, ordinary people have already had a say. They voted to leave the EU.” As if the narrow 2016 vote was not won by lies and—as we now know—fraud.36 As if there were anything democratic about a referendum where millions of European immigrants were disenfranchised and where, unlike in the Scottish referendum, 16 year olds couldn’t vote. It isn’t just the SWP; here is the Morning Star, continuing to insist that the establishment “was defeated essentially by the men and women of no property who revolted against being taken for granted”, yet not considering what issues they were revolting about.37

Put bluntly, we are in a hole and still digging. Socialist Worker is still siding with a reactionary demographic for whom the EU was actually a convenient proxy for all sorts of apparent evils. For more evidence on this, if it is still needed, we can revisit the Ashcroft findings. Leave voters thought the following were a bad force in society, immigration (80 percent), multiculturalism (81 percent) social liberalism (80 percent), feminism (74 percent), the green movement (69 percent) and the internet (71 percent). Some 51 percent did say capitalism was a force for evil, but so did 51 percent of Remainers.

There are now beginning to be consequences for this lack of clarity. On 23 June 2018, 100,000 people marched against Brexit, completely dwarfing the NHS march the following week. It seems reasonable to suppose that many on that march will have agreed with the left on a wide range of issues. But for seasoned veterans of Central London demos it was an unusual feeling to be on a large march with no left-wing paper sellers and leafleters. (At least Healy’s sectarians gave out leaflets at the 1968 anti-Vietnam war march explaining why they were not marching!)

Two weeks later 250,000 people marched against Donald Trump—and the ­contradiction suddenly became worse for the traditional left. For many (most?) people on that march Trump and Brexit are, if a measure of crudity might be permitted, two cheeks of the same arse—both signs of racist reaction with no progressive roots whatsoever.

It is important to understand that the class enemy is entirely clear about this—Farage told the BBC (in January 2017): “If I speak to Trump’s team, Trump’s close advisers, or even to the president-elect himself, none of them think Trump would have won if Brexit had not happened”.38 The fascists marching to demand that Tommy Robinson be freed from jail carried banners supporting Trump and Brexit. The links between Brexit fundamentalists and the Trump administration are becoming closer week by week. Rees-Mogg—who supported Trump before he was elected president—noted that the latter “appealed to voters left behind by the metropolitan elite and he exudes confidence about his own nation and a determination not to be a manager of decline, which also inspires the Brexiteers”.39

Yet the traditional left, so right about Trump (and the rising fascist movement) is currently forced to tell angry people who might be attracted to their political outlook that they are against Trump but pro-Brexit. Opposition to Brexit is growing, yet just what is the left saying to the 700,000 people who marched for a People’s Vote on 20 October 2018?

Imagine a worse case situation in the spring, a chaotic Brexit has led to queues on the M20, factory layoffs, food shortages and high inflation after a currency collapse. We will be forced to tell workers that all this is very dreadful and should be fought, but, ahem…we actually supported Brexit. It won’t wash.

The good news in all this—and yes, there is some—is that the very weakness of the extra-parliamentary left means that a rethink can be carried out without too much impact and upset. While there is time. If the desire is there.

18 In 2017, pensioner incomes after housing costs outstripped those of working families for the first time ever—Wilson, 2017.

19 They were also areas where the British National Party had shown strength. At the 2010 general election there were 26 seats where the BNP got 7 percent of the vote or higher—all but two of them (in Leeds) were in Leave areas six years later.